Meta can add website offers to copied ads even with promotions turned off – PPC Land

One Commerce Manager checkbox covers all ads, so Facebook and Instagram advertisers can run discounts they never chose. Is it on by default? Meta has not said.Meta can display discounts it detects on an advertiser’s website in Facebook and Instagram ads, including in a copy of an ad whose promotions had been switched off, according to a LinkedIn post published today by Bram Van der Hallen, a Meta advertising specialist who works in digital marketing at Edge.be. The control sits in Commerce Manager, under Settings and then Offer merchandising, in a checkbox called “Detected offers” that applies to all ads. The post does not cite a Meta announcement, and it does not say when the setting appeared or whether it is switched on by default.Meta can take a discount it finds on a shop’s website and show it inside that shop’s Facebook or Instagram ads, even when the shop had turned promotions off on the ad it copied. This matters for any business advertising on Meta with more than one offer live, because a discount meant for one campaign or one audience could show up somewhere else. The switch that decides this lives in Commerce Manager rather than in the ad itself, so turning promotions off on a single ad does not settle the question.The post, which went up this morning, opens with a warning. “Meta may now automatically detect offers from your website and use them in your Meta ads. Even when you have turned off this option for your original ad,” Van der Hallen wrote.The second paragraph names the mechanism. “When the option to display offers detected from your website and ads is enabled in Commerce Manager, Meta may then automatically display these offers in your ads. This setting can be found under ‘Settings’ > ‘Offer merchandising’ in Commerce Manager.”The third repeats the point about turned-off promotions and ends with a recommendation. “This may also happen when you have turned off promotions for your original ad. So if you want to take back full control, be sure to disable this option in Commerce Manager.”The post closes with “Meta Ads update spotted by Bram Van der Hallen,” which places it as a practitioner’s observation from inside the interface, not a company statement. Van der Hallen has appeared in PPC Land’s Meta coverage before: in November 2025 his LinkedIn critique of campaign consolidation, summed up in the line “Reach expands, but impact doesn’t follow,” anchored a report on advertiser scepticism over Meta’s AI automation.The post rests on two pieces of Meta’s interface that Van der Hallen published alongside the text, and Meta’s own wording in them carries more weight than the summary above it.The first is a notice inside a dialog titled “Duplicate your ad.” Its heading reads “Manage promotions for this ad in Commerce Manager.” The body says: “Eligible promotions can appear with your new ad, even though promotions are turned off for your original ad. Manage or turn off promotions anytime in Commerce Manager.”That sentence is specific. It concerns a new ad created by copying an existing one, and it says that the copy can carry promotions the original did not. Duplicating ads is a routine action in Ads Manager: media buyers copy ads to move them between ad sets, to relaunch winning creative, or to test a variation. A setting chosen at the level of one ad does not, on this evidence, travel with the copy. Meta directs the advertiser to Commerce Manager instead.The notice uses the word “promotions.” The settings page it points to uses “offers.” The left-hand menu of Commerce Manager, also visible in Van der Hallen’s material, has a separate section called “Promotions.” Whether Meta treats these as one thing or several is not explained.The second is the Commerce Manager page itself, reached through Settings and then Offer merchandising. It is split into two blocks.The first block is headed “All ads.” Beneath it: “Let Meta automatically display detected offers in your ads,” followed by a link reading “Manage all offers.” A single checkbox follows, labelled “Detected offers,” with the description “Display offers detected from your website and ads.” In the account shown, the box is ticked.The second block is headed “Ads leading to shop or product browsing.” Its description reads: “Choose which offers Meta can automatically display when people browse your products on Facebook and Instagram.” Two checkboxes sit under it. “Sale events” carries the line “Display sale events detected from your ad creative text.” “Seasonal event names” reads “Display seasonal event names next to related offers,” with an example that begins “New Year’s offer! Save 20%.” Both boxes are ticked in the account shown.Three sources of offer material therefore appear on the page: the advertiser’s website, the advertiser’s ads, and the text of the ad creative. The first applies to all ads. The other two apply to ads that send people into a shop or a product browsing experience inside Facebook and Instagram.Several points cannot be settled from the post or from Meta’s interface text.Van der Hallen’s post does not link to a Meta help article, and PPC Land was not able to review Meta documentation for the Offer merchandising settings.Meta has been reading offers off advertisers’ websites for more than two years. In July 2024, PPC Land reported that Meta had begun letting advertisers show custom offer details, such as discounts, on Instagram ad call-to-action buttons, with offers populated from the website URL entered at ad level. Meta’s system then predicted which offer each person was most likely to respond to, and an ad could carry up to 20 offers. At that stage the feature was limited to single-media ads in Instagram Stories and was not available to every account. When Meta found offers on the site, it told the advertiser how many and let them confirm or remove each one.In August 2025, Meta added targeted offers for US shops in Commerce Manager, letting merchants aim offers at new customers, followers, people who abandoned a cart in the previous 30 days, or custom audiences, with public or secret promo codes.The page Van der Hallen published describes something different from both. In 2024 the advertiser entered a URL in a specific ad and reviewed what Meta found. In 2025 the merchant chose which audience saw which offer. On the Offer merchandising page, the control is a single account-level checkbox headed “All ads,” and Meta’s own notice confirms that switching promotions off in one ad does not stop them from appearing in its copies. The direction of travel is from an offer an advertiser picks for one ad towards offers Meta finds and places across all of them.Whatever its default, the setting sits alongside a run of Meta features that start switched on and have to be found to be switched off.In August 2025, Meta said it would turn on Dynamic Media by default for new Advantage+ catalog ads created through the Marketing API from September 1, 2025, with full enforcement by October 20, 2025. Two months later, PPC Land examined how Advantage+ had become the default for sales, leads and app campaigns and the brand control trade-offs that came with it. In June 2026, REI said Meta had auto-enrolled it in an AI personalization tool that altered a vendor photo into a bicycle with two sets of handlebars, which ran on Instagram for about a week; the case exposed an enrolment setting many brands had not noticed.The pace picked up in the autumn. On October 15, PPC Land reported that Meta would turn on product browsing in existing ads on October 28 unless advertisers opted out, citing a 3% average conversion gain from an experiment across about 117,700 advertisers. On October 27, it reported that a Meta Pixel setting would count more conversions from November 12 unless advertisers opt out.The product browsing switch matters here. The second block on the Offer merchandising page covers “Ads leading to shop or product browsing.” Since October 28, ads that did not opt out may open product browsing experiences inside Facebook and Instagram, which means the “Sale events” and “Seasonal event names” boxes now potentially reach ads whose owners did nothing to enrol them in either feature.Meta is not alone in pulling offers or creative from an advertiser’s own site. On October 6, PPC Land reported that Google Ads would auto-apply website coupons to some campaigns from October 12. Google said it would “automatically identify and extract high-quality promotions” from advertisers’ sites for Search and Performance Max campaigns with linked location assets, enrolled advertisers automatically, and put the off switch in an account-level “Automated Promotions” setting among its automatically created assets.On October 21, Google said it would turn on image extraction by default for new Performance Max campaigns from December 4, even in accounts where the account-level dynamic images setting is off. The same day, PPC Land reported that OpenAI had told advertisers it would rewrite ChatGPT ads by default, with creative enhancements that can change headlines, descriptions, images, destination URLs and language.The pattern across the three platforms is consistent: the system reads material the advertiser has already published, decides what to put in front of users, and leaves the advertiser to find the control. What differs is where the control sits. Google’s coupon switch is at account level. Its image extraction default overrides the account level for new campaigns. Meta’s offer control, on the evidence of its own notice, sits in a different tool from the one where ads are built and copied.The question of responsibility is not abstract. On October 22, PPC Land reported that Meta’s revised Commercial Terms add an “AI Features” section that makes advertisers solely responsible for what Meta’s AI features create or change in their ads, including features Meta switches on itself. The terms were due on October 30. A day later, Meta moved the effective date to November 20 without saying it would change the text.Whether an automatically displayed offer falls within that section is not something the post or the Offer merchandising page addresses. A discount is a different kind of content from a retouched image or a rewritten headline, though. It is a price claim. If a detected offer has expired, applies only to some products, or was meant for a narrow audience, the person who taps the ad sees a discount that may not apply at checkout, and it is the advertiser’s name on the ad.The source of the offers raises a second issue. The “Detected offers” checkbox refers to offers detected “from your website and ads.” Meta’s revised terms also include a clause letting it crawl websites linked to a business’s products. When publishers objected, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the clause was about pulling “accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites” and was “not about scraping news sites.” Discounts listed on an advertiser’s site are one kind of product information. The post does not say how Meta collects the offers it detects, or whether that crawling clause plays any part.The post lands three weeks before Black Friday, which falls on November 27, 2026, with Cyber Monday on November 30. It is a period when retailers commonly run several offers at once: sitewide sales, category discounts, loyalty codes, email-only codes and bundle deals, often changing day by day. The “Seasonal event names” setting, with its example of a New Year’s offer, shows that Meta’s system can attach seasonal event names to the offers it finds.Refreshing creative for each phase of a sale typically means copying existing ads. On the evidence of Meta’s notice, each copy can carry an eligible promotion that the original did not.By late afternoon Central European Time, the post had drawn 59 reactions, two comments and three reposts. One comment came from Van der Hallen himself, promoting his newsletter. The other came from Nirar Punj, a paid media specialist who works across Meta, Google and LinkedIn ads.”That’s a sneaky one – I didn’t expect Meta to pull in an offer after I’d turned promotions off for the original ad,” Punj wrote. “I’m checking the offer merchandising settings in Commerce Manager on my accounts now, because a wrong discount showing up would be a rough surprise.”The comment sums up the practical problem. An advertiser who made a deliberate choice at ad level would reasonably expect it to carry over to a copy, and the setting that actually decides the outcome sits in Commerce Manager, outside the Ads Manager screens where ads are built and copied.Who: Meta and advertisers on Facebook and Instagram, in particular those running shop, catalog or product browsing ads. The change was flagged by Bram Van der Hallen, a Meta advertising specialist at Edge.be, with a comment from paid media specialist Nirar Punj.What: A Commerce Manager page called Offer merchandising contains a “Detected offers” checkbox under the heading “All ads” that lets Meta “automatically display detected offers” from an advertiser’s website and ads, plus “Sale events” and “Seasonal event names” options for ads leading to shop or product browsing. Meta’s own duplicate-ad notice says eligible promotions can appear in a copied ad “even though promotions are turned off for your original ad.”When: Van der Hallen posted today, November 6, 2026, three weeks before Black Friday on November 27. The post gives no start date for the setting.Where: In Meta’s Commerce Manager, under Settings and Offer merchandising, affecting ads on Facebook and Instagram. The post does not specify countries.Why: A choice to switch promotions off in one ad does not carry over to its copies, and the control that does decide whether offers appear sits in a separate tool. With Meta’s revised terms set to make advertisers solely responsible for what its AI features change, and product browsing already switched on for existing ads, a discount the advertiser did not choose can end up in an ad that carries the advertiser’s name.Every morning, get a curated digest of the last 24 hours in programmatic advertisingsource